Why Designers Hate Internet Explorer 6

5 Sep, 2011

Ask any designer if their work is supported in IE6 and you'll probably see them shudder. IE6 was right up there with Windows ME where Microsoft flops are concerned and, unfortunately, it's still in use on some computers today. Where professional web design is concerned, not supporting IE6 is generally considered acceptable due to the many bugs this browsers proved to have.

Transparency

Transparency is heavily used by designers these days. If you've seen the pages where the background displays through the text, you've seen transparency in action. It allows designers to get some very nice effects onto a page. IE6 messes this up in numerous ways and the workarounds are complicated and time consuming.

Margins

One of the most frustrating things for designers working on IE6 sites is the fact that the browser tends to be buggy where displaying margins are concerned. The end result is a sort of doubled margin that can ruin a design and make the best pages come off as amateurish.

Security

Internet Explorer 6 was right up there with Swiss cheese as far as holes is concerned. The browser is vulnerable to a host of security threats, which made it a nemeses of programmers that did their best to make sites secure.

CSS Versions

The world has moved on to CSS3 and IE6 doesn't support CSS2. This made it outdated in its time but, today, it's unable to display some of the most important and innovative tools that designers have at their disposal.

Any company with as long a history as Microsoft is going to have some bombs and IE6 was one of their biggest ones. Try surfing on this browser and quite a few sites will display a pop-up that will tell you that your browser isn't supported and that you really should think of upgrading to a newer version! There were even organized movements formed to get governments to upgrade from this browser.